Inaction Heroes

I have often been accused of slacking. When I wrote a weekly humor column, people were always saying to me, "So . . . you write one column a week?" They wouldn't come right out and say the rest of what they were thinking, which was: "And how long does that take you? Two hours a week?" But I knew.

What these people failed to understand is that the hard part of writing is not the typing part, but the thinking part. If you were to come into my office, you would most likely see me engaged in some activity that did not appear, to your untrained eye, to be work. You might see me clipping my toenails, or exploring the vast information resources of the Internet, such as the site that tells you what song was No. 1 on the record charts on any given day for the past 60 years. Or you might see me thrashing around with my electric guitar in my futile but ongoing (for nearly four decades) attempt to learn the guitar part to "Paperback Writer," which was No. 1 on my 19th birthday.

You'd probably think I was slacking. But you would be wrong. Because while I am engaged in these seemingly pointless activities, I am thinking about a critical writing issue, such as: Which is a funnier-sounding mineral name, feldspar or potash? It takes hours of grueling mental effort to solve that kind of problem, but you, the reader, see only the finished product (feldspar).

Another example is the Federal Reserve Board. It doesn't appear to do much. Every six months or so, it raises or lowers the prime interest rate by maybe a quarter of a percent. You think: How hard can that be? You could do that without ever leaving the golf course! Yet if you asked the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, I bet they'd tell you it's a lot of work.

I suspect that most people — like me and the Federal Reserve Board — think they work pretty hard. But it isn't always easy to tell the difference between working and slacking, especially in the modern American "information" economy, where relatively few people do anything that is inarguably work, such as going down into a coal mine and coming back up with pieces of actual coal. A lot of us would have to admit that if we skipped a day or two of "work," or even a couple of months, or maybe even three or four years, we might miss our paychecks, but the impact on society would be minimal, or in the case of some professions (consultants, editorial writers, Paris Hilton) nonexistent.

So the question is: What is work? Why do we work? Is it a moral duty, or do we do it only because we have to? Is it O.K. to not work if we can get away with it? Do we resent those who are able to slack? Or do we envy them?

These are some of the questions that Tom Lutz, a thoughtful and very thorough author, tackles in his book "Doing Nothing." Lutz was inspired to write it by his 18-year-old son, Cody, who decided to take a year off before starting college, and seemed content to spend his time lying on Lutz's couch watching TV. Lutz found that his son's behavior angered him, and this anger troubled him, because in his own youth he had spent a fair number of years engaged in countercultural activities not widely considered productive. (Raise your hands, all you boomer parents who can relate. I myself am typing this one-handed.)

Lutz's anger spurred him to action: "I started to write this book at least in part to understand my ire as I watched my son do what I had seen him (and myself) do many times before: he was doing nothing."

And so Lutz set out to trace the history of society's attitudes toward working and slacking. He begins with two 18th-century giants who professed opposite views. On one side stands Benjamin Franklin, creator of the archetypal workaholic, Poor Richard, who believes man has a moral duty to waste not a single moment in the relentless effort to accumulate wealth. On the other side stands Samuel Johnson, creator of the "Idler," who believes the only value of work is to enable leisure, and the highest calling is to do as little as possible.

These two contrasting views of work, Lutz shows, have remained with us across the centuries. In America, Franklin's work ethic has always dominated, but the slacker undercurrent has always been there, and has always resonated with the public. Much of Lutz's book is a survey of the many incarnations of the slacker in popular culture — from Bartleby the Scrivener to Bart Simpson, with all the bohemians and beatniks, hobos and hippies in between. What Lutz finds, over and over (and over) is that slackers and workaholics aren't always as different as they appear. Ben Franklin, it turns out, was a party animal who was often neither early to bed nor early to rise. Samuel Johnson, for all his praise of idling, was an immensely productive writer — and writing is hard work, as we have established (feldspar).

Lutz concludes that most of us are both workaholic and slacker — "we all tend to embody a bit of both ends of the spectrum." We feel we work too hard, but also that we fritter away much of our time. We scorn the lazy and unproductive, but we long to win the lottery so we can hit the hammock ourselves. We criticize our kids for doing exactly what we did when we were their age.

In the end, Lutz says, we need slackers, who serve "as a goad to examining our relation to work, as a role to adopt while finding our relation to work, as a critique of our culture's twisty relation to work and to leisure, and as a celebration of the same." Lutz's own son, he informs us, finally got off the sofa and went to work. Lutz himself declares at the end that, after all his hard work producing "Doing Nothing," he plans to take some time off.

My one complaint, as a reader, is that maybe Lutz worked a little too hard on his book. He includes a 34-page bibliography, which lists many dozens of references, and there are times when you get the impression that Lutz wants to make sure you know he read every one. There are too many passages that are little more than uninformative lists, such as this one, on the literature of sauntering:

"Leigh Hunt published 'A Saunter Through the West End' in 1861. Charles Dudley Warner, Samuel Clemens's co-author, published a collection of his 'Saunterings' in 1872. A book on 'sauntering' through the resorts in Nebraska, Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah was published in 1879, and there were many others in the years that followed, including 'Saunterings in New England' (1883), 'South-Coast Saunterings in England' (1870), 'A Saunter in Belgium,' (1885) and 'A Sauntering in Spain' (1906)."

Such tedious sections aside, there's plenty of interesting reading in "Doing Nothing," which left me with a deeper appreciation for the value of not working. In fact, I wish I could do more of it. Alas, I cannot: these toenails aren't going to clip themselves.

Dave Barry's most recent book is "Dave Barry's Money Secrets, Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?"